Chameleon | Nachtroer

Charlotte Van den Broeck was born in Turnhout, Belgium, in 1991. After studies in English and German, she took a Masters in Drama at the Royal Conservatoire in Antwerp. She has published two collections of poetry, Kameleon (2015), which was awarded the Herman de Coninck debut prize for poetry by a Flemish author, and Nachtroer (2017), which was nominated for the VSB Poetry Prize 2018 and the Ida Gerhard Prize. These two volumes are combined in Chameleon | Nachtroer, translated from the Dutch by David Colmer (Bloodaxe Books, 2020). Her poetry has also been translated into German, Spanish, French, Serbian and Arabic. In 2016 she opened the Frankfurt Bookfair together with Dutch poet Arnon Grunberg. In 2017 she was one of that year’s Versopolis poets, performing at several European festivals including Ledbury in Britain. As well as publishing critically acclaimed collections she is renowned for her distinctive performances, which differ from UK/US versions of spoken word as theatre pieces ‘searching for the speakability and experience of oral poetry’, now presented in English as well as Dutch.

David Colmer is an Australian writer and translator who lives in Amsterdam. He has won many prizes for his translations of Dutch literature, including the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (both with novelist Gerbrand Bakker), and major Australian and Dutch awards for his body of work. His translations of the poetry of Hugo Claus and Ramsey Nasr were shortlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and the Popescu Prize respectively, and his translation of a selection of Annie M.G. Schmidt’s classic children’s poetry was specially commended by the Foundation for Dutch Literature. Recent poetry translations include Paul van Ostaijen’s modernist classic Occupied City and Menno Wigman’s Window-cleaner Sees Paintings. His translation of a collection of the poetry of Mustafa Stitou will be published in 2019, and his translation of two collections by Flemish poet Charlotte Van den Broeck, Chameleon | Nachtroer, by Bloodaxe also in 2019.